shocks and socks and some economics

My sister has to write a short article for her course in economics and logically she sent it to me to be corrected. I am rather familiar with her topic so I thought I could easily skim through the five pages of text while drinking my morning coffee. I was wrong.

I have been studying economics since the age of 17 or 18 but have never, ever opened a Finnish economics book or a book about economics written in Finnish. Despite occasionally reading the financial pages of the main Finnish newspaper I have not paid too much attention to the discourse in my country. And hence had never realised that I could not understand a word of it.

I managed to get the main points of the introduction but soon after most of my comments were concerning her choice of words. Luckily she appeared online on msn and could help her sister – lost in translation.

Why would you use almost the same word for fiscal and finance? That is just ridiculous. Surely “finance” is more related to “monetary” than to “fiscal”.  I don’t get it. But apparently she could not change or modify the Finnish terminology just to please my ear and me.

Then the work “shock”. Oh my word. I got so confused but learned that the Finnish language does not know “sh” except in the case of some “loan words” i.e. words that have been taken from other languages. Interesting. I just thought she didn’t know how to spell properly.

My nose generally causes a negative externality (it is rather large and hence hides the rest of my face) because it is not the most beautiful. Then again, for the same reason, the size that is and the effect from it – the fact that it does hide the rest of my face – it could be considered a positive externality. And on we went the other day over coffee…a bunch of economic nerds. And funnily enough I can now understand why nobody else found us funny. Cos they just could not get us.

 

 

(And I have a hunch that in spite of my newly acquired interest in finance, especially emerging market finance, I maybe should not try to convince the Finnish banks about my brilliance and about my unique insights.)